The second and final event of the afternoon was by Christoph Bieber (Twitter, blog, Wikipedia) on the metamorphoses of the public intellectuals and their political debates. He started out with the national embedding of the intellectual due to the language they are writing in. From this embedding of public intellectuals follows of course that they change with the change in their public. Intellectuals are dependent on their public. With regard to their audience one can distinguish between many different sorts of intellectuals. All of them have in common that they used to use the written language to voice their opinion.

This main emphasis of intellectuals on the written language has changed with intellectuals moving into the mass media, metamorphosing into performers, focusing more on soundbites than on elaborate tracts. Corporate media present intellectuals with several problems, among them the task of having to align with the political leaning of the media corporation in which the intellectual is supposed to perform. Public intellectualism today is enacted and literally put on stage. The Yes Men were up next as examples of public intellectuals in the age of TV. The mantra of Speak Truth to Power was mentioned several times as a guiding motive for intellectuals. The latest phase of this metamorphosis of public intellectuals from writers into performers has just taken place. On the face of it, the internet seems to have led to a re-emphasis of the written word, but in the age of YouTube and cell-phone cameras, the combination of video and text is the main force shaping public intellectualism today. Twitter as a way to highlight and link to longer texts was also mentioned. Jay Rosen was mentioned explicitly as a good example for a modern public intellectual using the new social media.

The final metamorphosis happened when intellectuals started to write their own code and turned into programers. Examples here were Google Code and the Open blog of the NY Times. One of the code examples was written to watch and publish the different contributions to the presidential primaries in the US. The final example of the digital intellectual was, you guessed it, Julian Assange. Assange speaks truth to power in text, video and code. The final assertion that writing code may make you an intellectual was hotly debated in the discussion after the talk.

The most obvious difference to the usual scientific presentations I normally attend was that inthis presentation, every single slide was filled with text, mostly quotes and references but also some slides with bullet points. It was disconcerting to realize that this made it really difficult to follow the presentation. I guess I’ve been at too many scientific presentations…